historic centre of Córdoba
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How it came to be
Córdoba was founded by the Romans in the 2nd century BC and became the capital of the province of Baetica. After the Abbasid Revolution overthrew the Umayyad dynasty of Damascus, a surviving prince, Abd al-Rahman I, founded an emirate in Iberia in 756 and began the Great Mosque in 785. Reused Roman and Visigothic columns and capitals let the work finish in about a year. Its prayer hall was filled with rows of two-tiered arches, a design repeated in every later extension.
In 929 Abd al-Rahman III made Córdoba the seat of a caliphate that lasted until 1031. A minaret was finished in 958, and a new mihrab built for al-Hakam II in 971. In 987 to 988 the vizier al-Mansur added eight aisles on the east side, making the mosque the largest in the Muslim world outside Abbasid Iraq.
When Ferdinand III of Castile took the city in 1236, the mosque became a cathedral dedicated to the Virgin Mary, and the first mass was said on 29 June that year. In 1523, over the opposition of the city council and with the permission of Charles V, work began on a Renaissance nave and transept in the middle of the mosque. The mosque was inscribed as a World Heritage site in 1984, and in 1994 the property was extended to the surrounding old town, the Alcázar of the Christian Monarchs, the Roman bridge and the Calahorra Tower.
Travellers who came here
- 1867-10
He came by train from Seville on 22 October and spent a night at an old-fashioned Spanish hotel. In a later manuscript he wrote that townspeople, unused to foreigners, followed the party through the streets.
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